Opening: Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away

Like most Cirque du Soleil shows, the storyline isn’t anything remarkable. As the film begins, young Mia (Erica Linz) visits a small town circus and catches the eye of the Aerialist (Igor Zaripov), a muscular trapeze artist. Intrigued, she watches him perform but when he falls into a pit of swirling sand, she follows him into an alternate universe that seems to be something out of Alice in Wonderland. The film moves from one exotic set to another; director Andrew Adamson did most of the filming in Vegas, where Cirque has several elaborate stages. The incredibly acrobatic performers dangle from trapezes, jump into pools of water and scale seemingly insurmountable walls. Adamson does a decent job of capturing Cirque’s undeniable magic in the film, which makes good use of 3-D special effects and rightly emphasizes the physicality of the performances.